The Panjshir crackdown is now seeking to crush Badakhshan.
As concerns about the escalation of ethnic clashes in northern Afghanistan have increased, sources report a new order from Mullah Fazel Mazloum, the Taliban’s deputy defense minister, to disarm the group’s Badakhshan commanders; an order that was issued in threatening and ethnic-based language.
According to an exclusive report, Fazel Mazloum warned in a secret meeting with Taliban Pashtun commanders in Mazar-e-Sharif that “the Badakhshans must be crushed once and for all, just like the Panjshirs and Andrabis.” He called Badakhshan “a great threat to Taliban rule” and called for its complete suppression.
Mullah Fazel Mazloum is a well-known and notorious Taliban commander who was accused of war crimes during the group’s first rule for his role in ethnic massacres and collaboration with al-Qaeda and was imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for years. He was identified as one of the main perpetrators of the 1998 killing of Iranian diplomats in Mazar-e-Sharif.
With a history of extreme religious and ethnic extremism, this commander has now become a trusted face of Mullah Haibatullah and is in charge of the systematic suppression of non-Pashtun tribes in northern Afghanistan. The Taliban’s silence in the face of these obvious ethnic threats has raised concerns about the possibility of new humanitarian disasters in the northern provinces.
